Helping SSEN to power more than 4.1 million UK homes, through the strategic delivery of vital digital services to their customers.

Highlights

  • Replacing an end-of-life digital platform
  • Building new customer journeys based on audience and market research
  • Rolling out improved mobile optimisation

Background

Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) forms part of the FTSE-50 energy company, SSE. Their electricity distribution and transmission networks carry electricity to over 4.1 million homes and businesses across the north of the Central Belt of Scotland and also Central Southern England.  

They connected with Mando in a bid to strengthen their online offering, evolve their current website and build tools to reduce the cost to serve whilst offering customers the opportunity to self-serve.  They also wanted to replace an end-of-life digital platform and build a new site which would address their recent customer feedback.    

From the outset, SSEN wanted to continue to be the highest-performing energy provider for digital customer experience. 

The new platform required re-designed customer journeys - making it simpler and easier for customers to find what they want, as well as, improved mobile optimisation – making it easier to use the site on the go, and better self-serve capabilities - empowering customers to be more proactive and reducing the need for them to call SSEN.

The Header and Hero section of SSEN Distribution's newly designed and built website with large text and uncluttered navigation. There is a large image of electricity workers with a bold heading, description and link to Power Track alongside it

Business Drivers

At the start of the project, we engaged with SSEN Distribution to establish the key business drivers and objectives of our discovery process.

The business drivers were as follows:

  • Operational efficiency - to achieve more with less staff resource so that SSEN have greater capacity to progress innovation  
  • Technical excellence - to improve the technical solution so it performs at the industry leading benchmark 
  • Engagement - to increase the engagement of SSEN customers with the website 
  • Self-serve - to increase the share of customer requests and problems which they self-serve 
  • Technical performance - to improve how the website performs technically so it delivers a leading experience 
  • Satisfaction - to increase customer satisfaction with the delivery of the website experience 
  • Customer research - to increase SSEN's customer centricity through gaining customer insight via the website 
  • Awareness - to increase SSEN customers' awareness of Priority Services  
  • Conversion -  to increase active engagement with the PSR program 
  • Sustainable - to increase SSEN customers' awareness of Low Carbon and Net Zero initiatives 
  • Accessibility – to enable an inclusive digital service for all customers, regardless of their needs

A screenshot of SSEN Distribution's feature block and card listing components. There is lots of white-space and a clean distraction-free feel

Solution

As part of Mando’s delivery methodology, and after successfully completing our delivery phase, we agreed to choose a platform that met SSEN’s business objectives and security requirements. The results following our assessment were that we would use the Optimizely DXP platform. 

According to Cliff Hill, Senior Vice President, UK&I at Optimizely: 

“SSEN were looking for a replacement for their legacy CMS that empowered their Content Delivery team by giving them greater control, flexibility and an improved user experience.    

"The Optimizely solution delivered all these components meaning that SSEN can now offer a superior customer experience to their audience.”   

Choosing Optimizely assures, mitigates and protects against any power failure, physical intrusions, and network outages. The solution Mando developed in conjunction with our development standards utilised Microsoft’s .NET Framework. This future-proofed SSEN’s new digital solution.  

Using the .NET Framework allowed us to integrate SSEN’s 3rd party APIs and CRM systems. As part of the solution, we included our Core-Components framework. This allowed a content editor to create visual content direct into the CMS using several page layouts.  

As part of our workflow, we developed several bespoke components which allows the content editor to deliver pages, custom forms, estimate calculators, find out your supplier tools and distributor information.  

We also built a comprehensive triaging tool, to allow SSEN to direct and channel new and existing customers to the correct pages/content. A new network graph and table data tool allows us to show network statuses across the country from Orkney to the Isle of Wight. Part of the flexibility with the CMS allows the CMS editor to fully control all the content, from text labels to validation compliance.

An electrical worker high up repairing some power lines

Additional considerations when building the solution: 

  • Optimizely adhere to the following security standards, regulations and best practices – ISO 27001, Privacy Shield, GDPR, Secure Development Lifecycle, Azure compliance, DDoS mitigation, Origin Shield protection. 
  • Take advantage of the Azure platform and its global datacenters.  
  • Easy Content Management System enabling minimal effort to create and publish content. 
  • Azure Active Directory Integration – this allows SSEN to manage and control security policies and user account/groups and determine who can access areas of the CMS. 
  • Content Editor workflows, to allow SSEN to map out content delivery workflows when creating and publishing content. 

Outcome

To allow SSEN to continue to provide the best digital customer experience of any electricity distribution company in the UK, we designed and built a new website for SSEN Distribution, based on a market-leading digital experience platform, Optimizely.  

The new site addresses recent customer feedback and has redesigned customer journeys making it simpler and easier for users to find the information they want. We also made sure that it was better optimised for mobile, allowing customers to access information on the go. 

Taking the pressure off call centres was one goal and to realise this we engineered better self-serve capabilities – reducing the need for customers to call SSEN. 

To assist vulnerable customers, we developed the site in such a way that it was easy to sign-up to the PSR register through intuitive forms. 

We built the new SSEN website on the Optimizely platform in such a way that it will withstand the ravages of storm season. 

The custom tab component Mando built for SSEN Distribution site visitors to quickly access the right kind of connection information they need. There is a column of tab buttons on one side and a panel area to the other side.

It has the ability to auto-scale to meet peak demand, which means that the site is live when their customers need it most. 

With the Optimizely platform it was easy for us to integrate existing APIs in the back end, allowing us to focus on providing an enhanced self-serve customer experience on the front end. 

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